So Greater Manchester has FINALLY got pillar two testing data and this is why I've banged on about it. There have - when this data is included - been 465 new cases here in the last week. If you only look at pillar one, that number would be just 78. This is the *true* number.
This is the first time GM has had this data because it couldn't get it from govt - so it hasn't, until this week, actually known how many people were testing positive. And the real figure is *six times higher*. Not currently clear what the geographical spread is of the cases.
Previously this data was simply feeding into the national total. Whether anyone in central govt had any idea of the geographical spread of the data I don't know, but certainly GM had no idea how many of those cases had been recorded on its patch, until now.
Should add: we have nothing to compare this to. Andy Burnham just said 'it's almost like a light is going on' for the first time in terms of these testing numbers; ie, we don't have any sense of how they have changed over time. But we do at least know what they are for this week
